In one of the most astonishing sequences in "EO," a rapturous hymn to the natural world from 84-year-old Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, a wandering donkey gets lost in a forest primeval. Night has fallen, but pools of moonlight illuminate this hushed, dark world in all its living glory. A little frog skims along the surface of a rushing stream. A skittering spider spins its web. An owl frowns down at the donkey from its treetop perch, as though registering an intruder's presence. There are also a couple of howling wolves, a wary red fox and, in time, an array of green laser beams announcing the presence of nearby hunters, whose gunshots shatter the serenity of this woodland idyll.
The entire sequence tells much of the movie's story in miniature. Again and again this donkey, known as EO (an approximation of the sound he makes), will experience a moment of freedom, only for a few human beings to come along and drag him back into harm's way. If that risks making "EO" sound like a compendium of cruelty, rest assured that it isn't, though it may speak to Skolimowski's decades-long affinity for underdogs in movies like "Le Départ" (1967) and "Essential Killing" (2010). He knows that humans can be kind, but also that they can be abusive, with their often callous indifference to the rights and welfare of other creatures. The beauty that Skolimowski and the cinematographer Michal Dymek show us in "EO" — and shot for shot, this could be the year's most breathtakingly beautiful movie — isn't a denial of that cruelty, but a response to it.
It begins with a screen-flooding burst of red light and a thunderous passage from Pawel Mykietyn's orchestral score, which pulses and surges hypnotically throughout. In this early moment, EO is part of a circus act with a young performer, Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), who coos to him, caresses his coat and gives him carrot muffins to eat. Kasandra becomes the love of his life, the human he dreams about and longs for after they're separated and he is shipped off to his next home. But that's as far as Skolimowski goes in imputing motives or desires to EO, apart from the basic compulsions to eat, rest and roam. As the director seems to signal with regular closeups of EO's enormous eyes — they're somehow both inscrutable and soulfully expressive — there are limits to how much we can enter into, or even imagine, a donkey's inner life.
